


savante dans l'art des intrigues et des ruses d'amour

by basketofnovas (slashmarks)



Category: Benjamin January Mysteries - Barbara Hambly
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Role Reversal, F/F, Getting Together, Grief/Mourning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-07
Updated: 2020-11-07
Packaged: 2021-03-08 18:35:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,366
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27431347
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/slashmarks/pseuds/basketofnovas
Summary: When Ayasha survives the cholera epidemic in Ben's place, she goes to New Orleans to survive her grief. Once there, she meets Rose.
Relationships: Ayasha January/Rose Vitrac January
Comments: 2
Kudos: 4
Collections: Femslash Exchange 2020





	savante dans l'art des intrigues et des ruses d'amour

**Author's Note:**

  * For [within_a_dream](https://archiveofourown.org/users/within_a_dream/gifts).



> I hope my recipient enjoys the fic!
> 
> Title is from the (early) translation of Sappho into French referenced in story. You can read a modern English translation [here](https://uh.edu/~cldue/texts/sappho.html), and the French version [here](https://books.google.com/books?id=X_sNAAAAYAAJ&pg=PT1&source=gbs_selected_pages&cad=3#v=onepage&q&f=false). The line in question is "weaver of wiles."
> 
> I have tried to keep a level of historical accuracy similar to canon.

Ayasha hadn't known what she was looking for by going to New Orleans, but she stood on the doorstep of the widow Livia Levesque's house and reflected that it certainly hadn't been _this_.

Ben had told stories about America, especially to their friends, but they had been impersonal stories about the way things were in Louisiana society. He hadn't talked about his family, or himself as a child, except rarely. Ayasha, who didn't generally speak of her own childhood, hadn't pressed. Over the course of more than a decade of marriage, she had learned enough to find his mother, but not more.

Well, she could see why now.

She thought about pounding on the door and shouting swear words, or crying on the step, or lying down on the brick banquette and staying there until she died. _God, Ben,_ she thought for the ten thousandth time, _How dare you leave me?_

She had been eighteen when she met Ben in Paris, on her own for four years - three, if you counted that ridiculous French soldier, which Ayasha certainly would not - and running her own shop for two of those years. She wasn't an old woman now, but she wasn't young anymore, either. That girl had been a lifetime ago. She was still in mourning, still in the veils that brought her childhood back in ways she didn't care for, halfway around the world from everything she had known in France or the Maghreb, and that shop she had bought at sixteen had been sold to the seamstress who had worked for her the longest. 

Ayasha was a long way from home, and she was alone.

She crossed the plank over the gutter again, back to the street, and was deciding which way to go when assistance came in an unlikely form: a young woman, painfully and painstakingly beautiful, in a dress she - or someone else - had paid a fortune for. Ayasha eyed it. The seams were straight and the design beautiful, but she would have done a better job attaching the lace.

" _Oh_ , but have we met?" the woman said, gloved hand fluttering up, large, lovely amber eyes like a cat's stalking prey. "I didn't know Mother had a visitor today--"

There had been a sister, Ayasha thought. Two sisters? But Ben had spoken of a baby sister, definitely.

"You must be Dominique," Ayasha said, voice gone appallingly hoarse. "Ben - Ben spoke of you, sometimes."

"Oh," the woman said, eyes fluttering to Ayasha's veil, down her form. It hadn't been a tactful way of breaking news to a sibling, Ayasha thought. Well. This girl couldn't actually remember Ben. She would have been a baby when he left. " _Oh,_ " she said, again; then in tones that suggested she knew her mother, "You must be Ayasha. Mother didn't throw you out, did she?"

Later that evening, ensconced in a beautifully furnished cottage with coffee, pralines, and an incipient headache at Dominique's inability to stop talking for more than thirty seconds at a time, Ayasha admitted that the widow Levesque hadn't, technically, thrown her out. Dominique - "Call me Minou, _dearest_ ," - did not seem surprised or troubled by this. "Mother can be like that - you wouldn't believe what she said the other day when I spoke to her during Mass--"

They went down several minutes of gossip about people Ayasha had never heard. She knew she should have been paying attention, ordering names and families in her mind for New Orleans; if she was going to live here, and she had put a lot of money into the voyage, she would need to make a living as a dressmaker. To establish herself, she would need to know the wealthy, who would be her clients. But ever since Ben's death these things had run through her mind like water. She hadn't been able to think in Paris, had stared at a needle like she was trying to perform surgery with Ben's tools. Here in New Orleans, with an entirely unfamiliar social set, it wasn't better. All she could think of each family was, _Did Ben play for them before he left?_

Abruptly Dominique said, "--But I suppose she did say something awful - to you, I mean - and you in mourning for Ben - I'm _so sorry_ , dear, did you have somewhere to stay?"

"I - not yet," Ayasha said, dredging her mind up from numbness. And, "She said she was glad to see he'd at least married a lighter skinned woman." What Ayasha had said to that wasn't repeatable. It was probable that she would have been thrown out if she hadn't stalked back through the side door herself.

"That _does_ sound like Mother," Dominique agreed, taking a sip of coffee out of a delicate cup. "You'll stay with me, of course. I'm sure Henri won't mind," she said, and glance, not without some anxiety, at the furnishings.

"I don't want to inconvenience you," Ayasha said, although even the thought of staying with this child in her confection of a cottage had swept her with relief not to have to think about the problem anymore.

"Nonsense!" Dominique said, coming to a decision and staring at her with resolution. "You're like a sister, aren't you? I always wanted one."

Ayasha decided to wait to ask if she'd been mistaken in thinking Ben had two.

Ayasha might not have met Rose if it hadn't been for Dominique's impulsive offer. 

Ayasha was a very good dressmaker, and she had come with enough funds - from her savings, from the sale of the shop, and with assistance from Daniel ben-Gideon, who had sympathy for her grief - to establish herself in New Orleans. She had arrived in the city after a miserable sea voyage, lost, alone and unsteady in a way she hadn't been even arriving in Paris at the age of fourteen, determined to immediately divest herself of that soldier. But given a day or two in a rented room after that hideous argument with Livia Levesque, she would have found somewhere for her shop. 

Ayasha had practiced at landing on her feet; but she might not have had time to waste if she had been occupied with it immediately.

Dominique was appalled at the idea that Ayasha would have to go about establishing herself in business still in deep mourning. She insisted that Ayasha not even dream of paying her rent; instead she drew her into long chattering conversations about nothing - the romance novels she was reading, the affairs of her friends and of the French Creoles, and the latest fashions.

Ayasha only acquitted herself reasonably in conversation about the last. She remembered, distantly, when she had gone around flirting with other members of the reading society and with their friends in coffee houses, teasing Ben about it or over the rare women he looked at, making a show of it. That person felt almost as foreign as the girl she had been before Ben. She felt like she hadn't laughed since coming home from the shop to find him dead.

Dominique, under the chatter, was witty and every so often startlingly incisive; and she was patient with Ayasha's silences. Henri turned out to be her white lover, a wealthy, fat man from the planter class who had instantly made Ayasha think of the man she had been supposed to marry as an adolescent. But he had dispelled this reference soon enough with his response when he found out that Ayasha was Dominique's brother's widow; and not once had he expressed distress at Ayasha's presence in his lover's home.

The concept of race had never been particularly salient to Ayasha. Many of their friends in Paris had also been foreign, or Daniel had been a Jew, or one of the girls who sewed for her was Chinese... There were people who had been rude about her origins in North Africa, or about Ben, but that had generally been the end of it. 

Ayasha had never been one to keep her temper overly in check, and Louisiana was rapidly making her furious with all European civilization in a way she had once ridiculed some of her own countrymen for. But it made her appreciate Henri not minding her presence all the more the more accustomed she grew to Louisiana. She hadn't marked it much at the time.

Dominique tried to give her spending money, but Ayasha resisted it gently; she wasn't a child to have it doled out, and anyway she had money left over from Daniel, money she had expected to spend on housing and food as well as the shop that still waited in the future. She wasn't going to hang around coffee shops in deep mourning, anyway, but she hated feeling confined to the house. First off, Dominique's cottage was _not_ large enough to have any privacy. Second, it reminded her horribly of her childhood, and of needing a respectably urgent excuse any time she left the family house and to walk quickly and not let her eyes or path wander.

She found something of an answer in job lot sales, book shops, and similar - nothing too inappropriate for a new widow, nothing that would suggest she was breaking mourning with social occasions. It was on one of those trips outside, poking through the books on sale in a lot made up of most of a household estate, that she met Rose. It was rare enough to find another woman going through the books that Ayasha paused to examine her, seeing her trajectory: a tall, gawky woman with light eyes, in plain dress and tignon. 

She was trailed by five or six adolescents, all girls as well, all wearing tignons, but in dresses varied from as plain and conservatively cut as the woman leading them to frothily fashionable confections that wouldn't be out of place in Dominique's wardrobe, or Ayasha's commissions.

As the group drew nearer, Ayasha could make out her words: "--don't have to stay here around the books, but please stay on the premises and in sight..." And then, as she reached the books, to one girl, nearly grown, "Let me see if I can find that translation for you, Genevieve..."

"Which are you looking for?" Ayasha asked, moving over to give them space.

Genevieve looked up at her, wide eyed, as though she hadn't expected Ayasha to speak. To a girl at that age, Ayasha supposed, a widow in mourning in the European fashion must be some sort of nightmarish specter of a fate, curtained off by veils and stark black.

The woman looked at Ayasha with an adult's wry sympathy. "I'm hoping to find her a translation of _Iphigenia in Aulis_ ," she said. "She's read all of the Euripedes I have in French, my only copy is in Greek."

"There isn't one here," Ayasha said, "--But I have one myself at," she hesitated a moment before finishing the sentence awkwardly, "Home. I could lend it to you."

Genevieve turned a very pretty expression of hope to Ayasha, then to her chaperon. 

The woman smiled. "That's very kind of you," she said. "My name is Rose Vitrac; I run a school for colored girls. Genevieve is the oldest of my students, and one of the longest attending."

A school for girls, Ayasha thought - and not young children, and not run by nuns. She wondered if Rose actually taught the girls Greek, or only read it herself. Most of the girls' schools she was aware of taught sewing and manners. "Ayasha Janvier," she said. "I only just arrived in New Orleans, I'm staying with my - husband's sister, Dominique Viellard; she has a cottage on Rue Burgundy." Her voice only hitched a moment this time, speaking of Ben. "I would be happy to bring the book by." And perhaps have an adult conversation, she thought wryly

"My school is on Rue St. Claude," Rose said, and described the building for her.

"I'll be sure to come by," Ayasha said, and smiled at Rose through the veil.

As it happened Henri came by that evening, and Ayasha retreated to the garçonnière where she was staying and went through the books she had acquired since her arrival. There was the translation Rose had sought for Genevieve, and she had a few other books she thought the girl might enjoy if Rose didn't already have them; and it wasn't yet so late that calling on her would be unreasonable. Ayasha had no desire to pass another night agonizingly aware of her utter isolation in the world while Henri and Dominique played games together in the cottage; so she put on her widow's cap and veil and her gloves and went, again, to the street.

She found the school without much difficulty. Standing at the door she began to feel self conscious, calling so quickly; but Rose came to answer it very soon, and her smile was warm.

"I'm glad you found it," she said, opening the door. Ayasha followed her in, then exclaimed in disgust at the elaborate machine in the parlor she was led into.

Rose looked after her and laughed. "Frightful, isn't it?" she said. "One of my backers insisted on giving it to me, so I have to keep it out and pretend it might be used. It's meant, supposedly, to correct a girl's handwriting posture - you see where you strap them in--"

"Ibn kalb," Ayasha muttered. "Correct posture? Meant to traumatize a girl out of writing at all, more likely."

"The girls argue about how long someone should be sentenced to remain in it for heinous crimes; like a modern iron maiden, isn't it?" Rose gestured for her to sit down. "They're upstairs right now, their lessons have been over for a while. Did you find the book?"

"I did." Ayasha set down the bundle. "There were a few other translations - you may already have them, but I thought if not, I'd read them already..."

"You're very kind," Rose said again. "Would you like to have a look at my library? I imagine you may not have much if - you said you were staying with your sister-in-law?"

"I'm recently arrived from France," Ayasha said. "My husband - was born in New Orleans."

"France!" Rose looked at her, not without sympathy, but her eyes were bright with interest. "Was it difficult to arrange the trip by yourself?"

"Not as bad as when I came _to_ France," Ayasha said, and then ended up telling Rose a somewhat redacted version of her flight from the Maghreb at fourteen. Oddly, Rose seemed to brighten as she heard it, but didn't ask the sort of nonsense questions Ayasha received from people who had read too many romantic novels about women escaping the ravages of the Turks.

"But you _did_ manage it in the end," Rose said when she finished, and led Ayasha to the door to her bedroom. "My books are here; you're welcome to borrow anything you like, the ones I need for the school are in the classroom." She paused as Ayasha crouched, pulling the crepe back over her head to read more easily. "I'm sorry, I must sound ghoulish. It's just that you were younger than me, when..." Her voice faded out.

"You haven't yet asked me whether it was embarrassing to be paraded about in the nude in the harem or if it's true that Mohamedan women aren't permitted to buy cucumbers lest we deflower ourselves," Ayasha said, pulling a book from the shelf to examine the title, "So you're ahead so far. Did you escape marriage yourself?"

"I did," Rose said after a pause. She knelt next to Ayasha slowly, skirts pooling around her, face thoughtful. "I was a few years older, but it wouldn't have occurred to me to run away - that I would have had anything better to escape to, really. Maybe I wasn't as brave. I took nightshade instead." She paused. "I was lucky; that I didn't die, and that my father took it seriously, afterward, when I recovered."

Ayasha looked up and was startled by the sight of those light eyes, very close now. "There's more than one kind of bravery," she said. "I can't imagine refusing to my father's face, at that age." She looked away and the tension broke; instead she looked down at the book in her hand and blinked. "Oh. _Anacréon et Sapho?_ " she said.

When she looked back, Rose was blushing.

They didn't speak about it directly, but the slim translation anthology was among the volumes Ayasha borrowed when she walked back to Dominique's cottage later that night. 

The candles in the main cottage were out. Henri had left, or more likely gone to sleep with Dominique. Ayasha thought he probably would have married her if he could in New Orleans. (Perhaps _they_ should move to France, but Henri's family would never have tolerated it and he would obviously have been useless cut from the purse strings.) Ayasha lit her own candle and sat up in bed, flipping to Sappho's poems in the collection and reading the fragments; feeling frustrated as ever by the scraps available. 

There were girls in the city of her birth right now who were taught to read Greek and Latin and French by expensive tutors, not to mention Turkish and Arabic; but Ayasha and her sisters hadn't been among them. Her father had not thought there was much point in teaching girls anything but how to perform their prayers and the usual needle craft. Ayasha had learned to read after arriving in Paris. These poems had been a part of why; at the first shop she had worked for, the girls had taken turns reading to the others, when the owner was out especially. She still remembered how dizzy she had felt hearing Sappho's lines the first time.

She had met Ben eventually, of course. She had loved Ben, desperately, like no one else she had ever known.

But Ben was dead, and Ayasha had to make another life for herself.

She didn't return _Anacréon et Sapho_ for weeks, but she went back to call on Rose, at first once a week and then every couple of days. She eventually convinced her, with most of her skill at teasing and every Latin quote on the subject she could scrape up, to accept a gift from her. She used the excuse that she genuinely loved sewing and couldn't wear anything she made herself until next summer. 

It was a tignon embroidered with roses. 

That choice was simple, blatant even, but sometimes that was what worked, like their painter friend in Paris who had asked every woman of his acquaintance to pose for him. Rose took the scarf from her hands at last and raised her gray-green eyes to Ayasha's, still in the doorway where she had halted seeing it.

"I notice which book you asked to borrow first," she said. "But... You're still in mourning, of course."

"I won't always be," Ayasha said, and touching her hand, "And I may not be able to remarry yet, but you also aren't a man." 

"No," Rose said, carefully, "I'm not. Come in?" she said, deliberately stepping back, although Ayasha had crossed into the school many times now. This invitation was different.

"Are the girls occupied?" Ayasha asked, doubtfully. She knew full well how difficult it was to keep secrets from any group of five or six adolescent girls confined in one building together.

Rose half-smiled. "Fortunately, the door to my room locks," she said, and took Ayasha's hand. 

They looked at each other for a moment, once secured there. Ayasha was suddenly aware of how long it had been for her, and that she had no idea how long it had been for Rose.

"I suppose it's natural, being new, not to know where to start," Rose said, half-questioningly.

That was a lesson Ayasha remembered learning over again, when she had first had a partner she actually wanted. "You start wherever you like," she said, and putting action to words, reached over to touch Rose's face soft cheek. 

"Wherever I like," Rose said, half-questioning, half-musing; and before they could kiss, she pulled up the crepe veil over Ayasha's face, like uncovering a bride.


End file.
